Posts Tagged ‘productivity’

Thinking more about my embarrassingly long list of unfinished projects makes me appreciate Nehemiah’s simplicity all the more. He did one thing and he did it well. Nehemiah was not a multitasker, if such a thing even exists. He didn’t try to refocus the people’s attention to the temple (chapters 7-9) while he was working to build the wall (chapters 1-6). He separated the two projects and waited until one was completed before beginning the other. He did one thing at a time and he did it to completion.

The tendency to begin one project before another is complete must be resisted. It takes a lot of energy to do a job with excellence. Spreading your energy over more than one thing will lead to poor performance in all things unless you know something about physics that the rest of the world doesn’t.

Do you have a list of uncompleted projects right now? Try this: only add another project if you can cross off three others and begin to bring that list under control.

Just a few quick ideas that I hope will allow you to have a better weekend because you are not thinking about the previous week:

Schedule 15-30 mins before the end of the day

Close your door or find a place where you can’t be interrupted by people/phone/email

List out anything you are working on right now that will take you more than one step/action to complete in separate columns on a sheet of paper

Under each column write down anything you can think of relating to that particular topic. You can trigger your memory with:

all the notes you scribbled throughout the week

the sticky-notes you made

all the lingering emails/voicemails

review your calendar, mentally go through the meetings to trigger any thoughts or conversations you had

Once you’ve collected all of these notes into one location, trash all of the stickies/emails/voicemails/etc., just get rid of them. You don’t need them any more because you have them all in one place.

The idea is to get it all out of your head into a trusted place so that you aren’t bothered by thoughts of things you have to do next week or loose-ends you need to tie up. None of this is original, have a look at David Allen’s Getting Things Done.